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| Slievenamon Photo:Trounce/Wikimedia Commons |
In the southeast
corner of Tipperary, the mountain known as Slievenamon rises over the
surrounding plain. Since ancient times
it has been a place of worship, mystery and legend, the haunt of spirits, fairies
and witches, its very name, Sliabh Na MBan, means, “mountain of the
women”. Visible for many miles, the dome
shaped summit is crowned by a huge burial cairn, said to be the entrance to the
Celtic underworld. Charles Kickham, author
of the novel Knocknagow, and one of Tipperary’s most beloved sons, wrote
an ode known as “Slievenamon”, considered by Tipperary people everywhere to be
their anthem. There was however, an earlier
song of the same name, it recalled a group of Irishmen killed by
English soldiers near the slopes of the mountain during the doomed Rising of 1798.
At
that time, about 25 miles to the northwest of the mountain, lived two young men named Andrew O’Dwyer and Michael Ryan, both born in the
mid 1770s. From records of arrests
that were made in the area where Andrew and Michael lived we know the United
Irishmen were active there, though we will probably never know whether they
themselves actually took part in the rising.
Both the
O’Dwyers and Ryans were important, powerful clans in the southern Tipperary
baronies of Clanwilliam and Kilnamanagh until their overthrow by Oliver
Cromwell in 1654. Kevin Whelan, a
history professor in Dublin, conducted a study of Irish families and discovered
that the descendants of those who were large estate owners before Cromwell’s
confiscations could often be found still living within ten miles of their ancestral
homes. This is borne out by the Ryans
and O’Dwyers, who to the present day remain the most prevalent names in the area,
and the landscape is dotted with ruins of O’Dwyer castles; one, Ballysheedy
Castle, stands near Annacarty. But the
confiscations did come; the vast O’Dwyer and Ryan holdings were lost.
According to John O’Hart, in his noted book, Irish Pedigrees, the
O’Dwyer and O’Ryan families both descended from Milesius, the King who ruled
Spain in 1600 B.C., and it would appear Mr. O’Hart may be correct. Recent DNA tests were done on men with old
Gaelic surnames, and their DNA was found to be virtually indistinguishable from
that of the Basques of Northern Spain.
Andrew
and Michael were probably tenant farmers, or farm laborers who had known each
other since boyhood. We do know they had
families. Andrew and Anna O’Dwyer’s daughter,
Alice would later marry Michael Ryan’s son Cornelius, raise a family of their
own and in the decades to come, most of that family would make their way across
the Atlantic to build a new life in America.
In the meantime, life was a constant struggle for the laboring classes in Ireland. Early in Alice and Cornelius’ life they were
acquainted with hunger and disease. 1816
has come to be known as the year without a summer. That year, when they were teenagers, the
entire world was hit by devastating climate change. In Ireland cold rain fell for 142 of the 153
summer days. The potato crop failed, and
typhoid and food shortages swept Ireland and Europe.
Violence
was part of their everyday lives too. One
official maintained,”Tipperary and
Limerick are the two counties in Ireland where the peasantry are the worst
disposed and most difficult to manage”.
From yet another,”With a stone of
two and a half pounds weight, a Tipperary peasant will strike an object with as
much precision at ten yards, as the generality of persons would at that
distance with a pistol ball.” That fact inspired the nickname, “Tipperary Stone Throwers”.
While this seems like a highly romanticized view of a violent, deadly pastime, even when death did result, the authorities were not inclined to take it very seriously, as the inquest into the death of one Pat Phelan in 1857 demonstrates. The coroner’s verdict-- “died from disease of the chest, accelerated by a fracture of the skull”.
Part 2 tomorrow
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